Thursday, 7 January 2010

New media can be good and bad as any media can be good and bad, depending on the content of communication and the presentation of the content.

Earlier this week we could witness how the interplay of new communication forms and the machinery of the traditional media companies trying to make money from attention interplayed to create a hype around something without real importance, distracting from the questions that need an answer in our societies or, speaking as a cosmopolitan, in our common society.

"The project aims to promote positive examples of ethnic groups coexisting peacefully in a volatile region riven with frozen conflicts in an attempt to provide an alternative to what is usually a partisan local media that not only self-censors, but also spreads misinformation and negative propaganda. As with the first stage of the project, the focus was on ethnic Armenians and Azeris living in Georgia."

Through the project, its texts, and its picture series we learn that what looks like a "natural" conflict is nothing but political conflict economy, that people and peoples can live together if they aren't told that they can't.

And through the new media we can all find out.

You can see this in the way I found the project:

I follow @letzi83, Media and External Relations coordinator for the European Youth Forum in Brussels, on Twitter.

In the end, the countries of the Southern Caucasus - Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia - are European countries, all three members of the Council of Europe, and what is happening there is happening here in Europe. And since remote conflicts can become close conflicts as we have seen during the Georgian-Russian war in 2008, I am more than happy to see that Europeans use new media to tell positive stories trying to end these useless conflicts.

Now the question is: When will the old media learn to tell these stories, too, instead of pushing for conflict stories that dominate the daily news all over the place?